RIM denies rumors it’s dropping the PlayBook

Best Buy,Staples and Office Depot have all slashed the price of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook, taking the tablet’s price as low as $299.99 for the 16 GB version.

Barron’s reported that chip analyst John Vinh of Collins Stewart wrote in an analyst note that the company had “stopped production of its PlayBook” and was seriously considering following HP out of the tablet market.

In a statement, a company spokeswoman said, “RIM doesn’t typically comment on rumors, but any suggestion that the BlackBerry PlayBook is being discontinued is pure fiction. RIM remains highly committed to the tablet market.”

RIM shipped only 200,000 of the devices last quarter. The PlayBook has been mentioned as one of the devices that will be hardest hit by Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which was made by the same hardware company — Quanta — as the PlayBook, looks almost exactly like the RIM tablet and is still $100 cheaper than PlayBook’s lowest the discounted price.